Shakespeare's Pacifism

Like Youth and Age or
Reason and Passion, War and Peace was one of those polarities that Renaissance
writers persistently thought about as well as with. Reflection upon war and
peace was at the heart of the Humanist movement, just as the conduct of war
and peace was at the foundation of the European state system during the early
modern period. This concern with war and peace arose from Humanism's defining
traits: its exaltation of fame, its fascination with the military cultures of
Greece and Rome, its emphasis on human dignity and freedom, its pursuit of secular
knowledge in history and psychology, and its political commitment to improving
the quality of institutional and personal life.1

The humanist response
to war and peace often split into opposing positions categorized as martial
vs. irenic--that is militarist vs. pacifist.2
Associated with what some scholars label "civic humanism," militarists like
Caxton, Machiavelli and Guiccardini lionized
an ideal of the prince or courtier as soldier and scholar and regarded the warrior's
activity as essential for individual achievement as well as for social order.3
Their pacifist opponents, who, like Erasmus, Thomas More, Baldassare Castiglione
and Juan Vives, were often identifed as "Christian Humanists," envisioned the
ideal prince or courtier as a jurist and philosopher, and criticized the military
ethos as irreligious, immoral and impractical.4
This debate shaped the actions of monarchs, the deliberations of councils, the
exhortations of divines, as well as the imaginative productions of artists and
writers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Shakespeare repeatedly
dramatized the disagreement between militarist and pacifist perceptions of warfare
in the many plays he devoted to military matters. This essay charts Shakespeare's
development from a partisan of war to a partisan of peace in the course of his
career. It argues that the central turning point of this development occurred
between 1599 and 1603--the publication dates of his two battlefield plays, Henry
V and Troilus and Cressida--and that the shift in outlook reflects a shift in
British foreign policy that began during the last years of Queen Elizabeth's
reign and was completed with the accession of King James I.5

* * *

"A prince therefore must
not have any other object nor any other thought, nor must he take anything as
his profession but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is
the only profession which befits one who commands." So Machiavelli opens chapter
XIV of The Prince entitled "The Prince's Duty Concerning Military Matters."6
His equation of sovereignty with military strength was both traditional and
innovative. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, European political power and
social status were vested largely in a warrior elite descended from Germanic
chiefs. Their martial values and cultural identity were sublimated by the intellectual
and bureaucratic legacy of the Church of Rome into the institutions of feudalism
and the ideology of chivalry, but Europe throughout the Middle Ages retained
the underpinnings of a warrior culture.7
Hence the symbols of gentility and honor were inextricably tied to the practise
of arms. With the secularization of literacy and the rediscovery of classical
civilization in the Renaissance, learning became a source of prestige no longer
restricted to the clergy and was eagerly pursued by military aristocrats. The
paradigm of the Renaissance prince combined the virtues of the general and the
scholar. In the texts that he studied and the statues he admired, he found not
only models of intelligence and grace, but also paradigms of military strategy
and a celebration of amoral prowess free of the moral strictures of the Christian
Church. In The Art of War, Machiavelli observes that "since military institutions
are completely corrupted and have, for a long period, diverged from ancient
practises, bad opinions about them have arisen, causing the military life to
be despised..."8 and calls
for "a rebirth of classical military skill through the imitation of ancient
military institutions."9

That call for a humanist
militarism was widely heeded--by Machiavelli's patron Lorenzo de Medici, by
mercenary captains who elevated themselves to nobility like Federico da Montefeltro,
Duke of Urbino, by the Kings of England and France, Henry VIII and Francis I,
and by Elizabethan courtiers like Sir Phillip Sidney and Sir Walter Ralegh.
For them war and politics were the extensions of one another and formed the
opportunity, or "occasione," for displaying a worldly "virtu"--a self-created
ability forged in mortal strife. Machiavelli sees the presence of many warring
states as the reason why "in Europe there are countless excellent men"; he finds
vitality and health in the class struggles, civil wars and foreign engagements
of the Roman Republic, but disdains the pax romana of the Empire as the source
of ability's decline.10
Humanist militarists had no use for medieval justifications of war--that it
was God's punishment upon sinning man or a means of bringing about peace. For
them it was an end in itself, the fundamental condition of social life, individual
psychology and all creation: "There is not in nature a point of stability to
be found; everything either ascends or declines: when wars are ended abroad,
sedition begins at home, and when men are freed from fighting for necessity,
they quarrel through ambition...I put for a general inclination of all mankind,
a perpetual and restless desire after power that ceaseth only with death."11

Such glorification of
war and denigration of peace permeate Renaissance culture. Maps and diagrammatic
accounts of contemporary battles were distributed as broadsides. Treatises in
military science, designed to teach advanced techniques of strategy, battle
formation and fortification, were widely reprinted and studied by playwrights
like Marlowe, who included a lengthy lesson on how to penetrate different sorts
of ramparts in the second part of Tamburlaine. And Shakespeare both satirizes
and adulates the current fascination with the ancient wars and the punctilio
of combat in the character of Fluellen in Henry V. Sermons, poems, political
speeches repeat the lesson that "peace is quiet nurse/ of Idlenesse and Idleness
the field/where wit and power change all seeds to worse,"12
that it is not to be trusted, that it is a hidden disease of the body politic--a
cause, in Hamlet's words, of "th'imposthume .../that inward breaks and shows
no cause without/why the man dies"(4.4.27); that it rather than war is God's
punishment upon man.13
Elizabethan drama in general clearly illustrates the prominence of Renaissance
military culture. Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Massacre at Paris , the anonymous
FamousVictories of King Henry V, and Peele's Battle of Alcazar edify popular
audiences with what Jorgensen refers to as "War's cheerful Harmony"14
-- sound effects of drums, trumpets and cannons, spectacles of armor, weaponry
and carnage. This is the background music for many of Shakespeare's plays and
the environment that determines Jaques' selection of the role of "soldier--
full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard/ Jealous in honor, sudden and
quick in quarrel/Seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth" as
representative of young manhood itself.15

But if militaristic approval
of war was dominant, it was by no means monolithic. In 1516, three years after
Machiavelli sent The Prince to his patron, the most prestigious humanist in
Europe, Desiderius Erasmus, published The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio
Principis Christiani ), which he wrote as a handbook for the future Emperor
Charles V. In it, he advocates an "Art of Peace" contrasted to Machiavelli's
Art of War.16 Rather than
normal health, Erasmus sees war and violence as aberrant pathology--in nature,
in society and in the individual.17
Rather than identical with force, Erasmus sees power or authority as distinct
from it.18 The duty of
Erasmus' prince consists not of making or preparing for war, but rather of avoiding
it and serving his people, on whose satisfaction he depends for legitimacy.
Real power and true heroism lie not in physical dominance over others but in
self mastery.19 To establish
and maintain peace should be the goal of all princes, a goal achieved by the
greatest spriritual and temporal leaders in history, Jesus and Augustus.20

In 1517 Erasmus published
another of his numerous anti-war works, The Complaint of Peace (Querela Pacis
), headed with the epigraph, "The Sum of All Religion is Peace and Unanimity."21
In it he adds a series of pragmatic objections against militarism to the spiritual
ones in the Instititutio. War is conducted not for the benefit of the people
but for the aggrandizement of princes; the hoped for benefits of battle--righting
wrongs, gaining territory, resolving disputes, revenging hurts--never approximate
the actual costs in lives, property and social disruption: "There is scarcely
any peace so unjust, but it is preferable, on the whole, to the justest war.
Sit down before you draw the sword, weigh every article, omit none, and compute
the expence of blood as well as treasure which war requires, and the evils which
it of necessity brings with it; and then see at the bottom of the account wheteher
after the greatest success, there is likely to be a balance in your favor."22
And while Machiavelli praises religion for providing an invaluable ideological
support for political strategists, Erasmus directs his strongest invective against
those who attempt to use religion to aid in making war:

This outpouring of pacifist
sentiment was at first welcomed by the monarchs to whom it was directed. Under
the influence of Cardinal Wolsey, who seemed to share Erasmus' and More's
views that religion should condemn rather than encourage war, Henry VIII agreed
to make a treaty of "Universal Peace" with his rival, Francis I: "This peace
treaty with France was an element in a much wider scheme which Wolsey was
promoting on behalf of the whole of Europe...he was accepting the ideals of
the international religious humanists... Educated within the ethos they evoked,
Wolsey. was ready to act on their belief in the peaceful possibilities of
human nature...to Henry VIII Wolsey offered the enormous prestige of leading
Europe towards 'humanistic peace' in place of the traditional prestige of
European warfare."24
Two years later, in 1518, Henry and Francis met with grandiose fanfare organized
by Wolsey to commemorate the treaty at the "Festival of the Cloth of Gold
in Honor of Perpetual Peace." But by 1523, jealous of Francis I's prestige
and allowing himself to be manipulated by Charles V's fear of an alliance
between France and England, Henry had exchanged the role of peacemaker for
that of conqueror and had mounted bloody though fruitless invasions of both
Scotland and France. 25

The repeated collapse
of peace policies like Wolsey's along with the repeated triumph of ever more
brutal militarisms in later European history have led some historians to deny
this pacifist strain in Renaissance thought: "The idea of war may, to many living
now, have become repulsive, unnatural and essentially destructive. The historian
has to note that this marks a big change. War appeared in quite a different
light through the greater part of history."26
Others have treated it as only a passing fantasy, a sentimental wish fulfillment.
J.R. Hale for instance states that "the international wave of quasi-pacifist
feeling that for a generation stirred the writings of... [European Humanists]
soon died away."27 And
he dismisses pacifism as no more than "a creative irritant to those who wrote
about war throughout the century."28

However, the phenomenon
of Renaissance pacifism is neither an anachronistic construct nor an ephemeral
aberration. Like humanist militarism, it derives from a rich range of ancient
models, including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the teachings of Stoics and
Epicureans and the cultural ideals of the Pax Romana. 29
Fifteen years after it appeared, according to Sir Thomas Elyot's Book of the
Governor, Erasmus' Institutio was still "the most widely read and quoted literary
production of the period," and its purpose of cultivating a humanist peacemaking
Prince was adopted both by the tutor of Queen Elizabeth, Roger Ascham, in his
Schoolmaster, and by Castiglione and his educational handbook, The Courtier.30
Between 1517 and 1529 alone, The Complaint of Peace went through twenty four
editions and was translated into most European languages.31
Its engaged pacifism typified opinions originating in a circle of Humanist scholars
known as the London Reformers, including More, John Linacre and John Colet,
and spreading to Guillaume Bude and Jean Postel in France and Juan Luis Vives
in Spain. The visual arts of the sixteenth century display further evidence
of pacifist sentiment. Peter Brueghel's "War of the Treasure Chests and Money
Bags" (1567) illustrates the satirical indictment of conducting wars for plunder
and profit made by Erasmus in the 1529 colloquy," Charon," while Urs Graf's
etchings portray the sufferings of civilians and the brutality of soldiers with
images that initiate the graphic tradition of depicting the horrors of war carried
forward by Caillot, Rubens, Goya and Picasso .32
The status of pacifist ideas oscillated between subversive and orthodox throughout
the Renaissance, depending upon the shifting alliances and moods of rulers.
After being lionized by both Charles and Henry, Erasmus became persona non grata
at the courts of the great and retired to his study in Basel in 1521. The Complaint
became a dangerous text, anonymously translated into English and condemned and
burned both by the French and the Spanish authorities.33
The "Spanish Erasmians"were forbidden to publish additions to "Charon" by the
censors of Charles, as Erasmus himself had predicted in The Complaint of Peace
: "...matters are come to such a pass, that it is deemed foolish and wicked
to open one's mouth against war, or to venture a syllable in praise of peace;
the constant theme of Christ's eulogy. He is thought to be ill affected to the
king, and even to pay but little regard to the people's interests, who recommends
what is of all things in the world the most salutary, to both king and people,
or dissuades from that which without any exception is the most destructive."(191)
One can surmise that during the period of dynastic and growing religious warfare
in the later sixteenth century, pacifist ideas were suppressed rather than "dying
away," as claimed by Hale. Indeed, they make their persistence known by the
vituperation of attacks upon them in militaristic literature and religious propaganda.
In Marlowe's Tamburlaine, for example, Calyphas is stabbed to death by his heroic
father for refusing to join battle after his scruples against killing are ascribed
to a voluptuous laziness.34
In Robert Wilson's, "The Cobler's Prophecy" (1594), when the character called
"Contempt" voices these anti military sentiments-- "thou saist thou art going
to thy Patron Mars with a suplication for bettering thy estate, and how, by
war: wher how many rapes wrongs and murders are committed, thy selfe be judge,
all which thou esteemest not of, so thy own want be supplied"35--he
is punished by Mars with the ruin of his city. And the many sermons by Protestant
divines cited by Lily Campbell to show ecclesiastical support for a war policy
are designed to neutralize the pacifism of the early church advocated by Anabaptists
throughout sixteenth century Europe.36

The claims of war and
of peace also remained in tension during royal spectacles. At a "grand triumph
in honor of peace" in Lyon celebrating the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis that brought
a temporary close to the hostilities among Spain, France and England in 1559,
"journeymen printers erected a colossal god Mars thirty feet high and bristling
with arms. As Mars burned, there gradually emerged from within him, safe and
sound, the white figure of Minerva reclining with the nine Muses on the rock
Parnassus, beneath which spouted a Castalian spring of wine and water, with
Pegasus just leaving it: 'demonstrating that the death of Mars is the resurrection
and the life of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the liberal arts.'"37
And similar pageantry graced the triumphal entry of James I through London on
his coronation in 1603: "at Temple Bar, James saw Peace at the gates of the
Temple of Janus, 'signifying...that Peace alone was better, and more to be coveted
then innumerable triumphs... for it is a triumph itself. Thus Peace stands with
Mars at her feet.'"38 The
frontispiece of James' Workes displays the same image of the goddess of Peace
trampling the war god at her feet. His first speech to Parliament makes James'
outlook explicit: "The first of those blessings which God hath jointly with
my person sent unto you is...Peace abroad with all foreign neighbors...I found
the state embarked in a great and tedious war and only by my arrival here and
by the Peace in my person is now amity kept where war was before, which is no
small blessing to a Christian Commonwealth, for by Peace abroad with their neighbors
the towns flourish, the merchants become rich, the trade doth increase and the
people of all sorts of the land enjoy free liberty to exercise themselves in
their severall vocations without peril or disturbance."39

The dominant Stuart mode
of expression might be characterized as a culture of pacifism. "The civic pageantry
that celebrated the new reign...returned rather to the theme of Astraea than
to that of Arthur, to imagery of peace and plenty than to the martial mystique
of knight errantry, " observes Arthur B. Ferguson.40
And Thomas Middleton's court masque, "The Peacemaker," reverses the political
message of the debate between The Soldier and Contempt in "The Cobler's Prophecy."
A character named "Detraction" longs for the heroic past and is answered thus
by "Peace": "Were blows more bountiful to thee? Did blood yield thee benefit?
War afford thee wealth? Didst thou make that thine own by violence, which was
another's by right...Has not in foretimes unwilling necessity erected two hospitals?
and now most free and willing charity hath...raised twenty almshouses... Is
not the sum of all religion established by [Peace]? Are not the flesh-eating
fires quenched and our faggots converted to gentler uses?"41
George Herbert devoted several of his public writings to anti-war propaganda:
"Here makes Religion, Queen of Peace, her seat/ While on our waters, Christ,
move thy blest feet." 42
And as far away as Poland, James' reputation inspired the pacifists of the Socinian
Anabaptist movement to dedicate their "Racovian Catechism" to the British sovereign.43

The triumph of peace celebrated
in Stuart culture was the outcome of a confict waged throughout the Tudor century.
One of the theatres of that conflict was the drama itself. As Louis Montrose
points out, "The Elizabethan playhouse, playwright and player exemplify the
contradictions of Elizabethan society and make those contradictions their subject."44
In the many plays about war staged in Elizabethan London, the battles that most
engaged the audience's attention were those between martial and irenic positions.

The poles of this dispute
generate a grid upon which Shakespeare's plots, characters, and themes can be
charted--both in individual plays and over the course of his career. That career
begins with the Marlovian militarism of the first history tetralogy and the
glorification of violence in Titus Andronicus andTaming of the Shrew, all written
during the early 1590's. In the middle nineties, with King John and the four
plays of the second history tetralogy, the battlefield remains the arena for
the exercise of both individual and collective virtue. But while the articulation
of the militarist viewpoint becomes increasingly emphatic and sophisticated
by the time of Henry V in 1599, its margin of victory over pacifist critiques
narrows almost to a standoff.

Troilus and Cressida,
written in 1602 or 1603, marks a turning point. In it Shakespeare mounts an
attack on classical war heros and on the very arguments for going to war he
had supported earlier, and he undermines the whole set of values and symbols
that constitute Renaissance military culture. The plays of Shakespeare's "tragic
period" which follows Troilus and Cressida continue to focus on the problem
of war, but with a deepening psychological penetration. Othello, Macbeth, Anthony,
Timon and Coriolanus all are great generals whose martial virtues are shown
to be tragically flawed. The plays in which they are protagonists reveal that
military power, the highest value of both the hero and his society, is a concomitant
of deficiency in power over oneself and finally the loser in a battle with the
greater power of love. In the late romances, Shakespeare continues to portray
the psychological and ethical deficiencies of military men, but in the final
acts of these tragicomedies, he moves from anti-militarist critiques to affirmations
of the state of Peace. Whether it is the pastoral landscapes of Pericles and
the Winters Tale, the plenty and fertility associated with the Goddess Eirene
in the pageants of the Tempest, the evocation of the Augustan and Christian
pax universalis in Cymbeline, or the reconciliation of rivals in all of them,
Shakespeare at the end of his career repeatedly evokes the positive symbolism
of the pacifist tradition.

In his very last play,
armed with powers of wish fulfillment strengthened by his experience writing
romance, Shakespeare takes on the more resistant material of history as a vehicle
for expressing a pacifist outlook. In an ironic and poignant conclusion to the
saga of Erasmian influence on Renaissance culture, the poet recreates Henry
VIII, the king who betrayed the hopes of the London Reformers, in their image
of the perfect peacemaking Christian prince.

Despite the centrality
of the problem of war in Shakespeare, scholarship has tended to overlook it.
In the one book on the subject, Shakespeare's Military World, (1956) Paul Jorgensen
remarks that "...few critics have presumed to ask so broad a question as whether
the background of the play was war or peace or what difference this made in
the drama."45 Those who
do ask the question--and with the return of interest in historical studies recently,
the number is increasing-- have with very few exceptions either denied or dismissed
the presence of a serious pacifist outlook anywhere in plays, perhaps following
the lead of the historians mentioned earlier. Oscar Campbell, for instance,
in his book on Troilus and Cressida assumes that the very idea of pacifism is
anachronistic: "... a close scrutiny of the action fails to reveal advanced
humanitarian views. Even if Shakespeare had succeeeded in expressing them, they
would have been incomprehensible to the audiences of his day. Troilus and Cressida
when approached without anachronistic predispositions, shows unmistakably that
its author is presenting a striking example of an irrationally continued and
studpidly managed conflict...Only because this war is waged anarchistically,
does the author paint it as a black picture of human effort."46
And while recognizing the influence of Jacobean pacifism on the later plays,
Jorgensen denies that Shakespeare ever could have held that view himself: "When...we
study the aspects of peace that were available to Shakespeare...we must study
them as they were conventionally studied in Elizabethan treatises and plays:
from the point of view of their corrective counterpart in war. It is war rather
than peace that is the clearer, dominant force.47...
The philosophy of war and peace that we now refer to as pacifism is espoused
by not a single admirable character in Shakespeare."48
The mechanisms of denial evident in this passage operate throughout what is
otherwise an invaluable book: Jorgensen doesn't consider the possibility that
Shakespeare's views may have changed in the course of his career.

More recent criticism
acknowledges the influence of Jacobean pacifism on the later plays, but offhandedly
trivializes both its political claims and the notion that Shakespeare could
ever have taken them seriously. Thus Frances Yates: "Jacobean peace--and James
forever emphasised himself as a peacebringer and peacemaker--was an avoidance
of conflict. It carried with it no mission of universal reform or support of
European Protestantism... . Prince Henry wanted to end "jars in religion" by
breaking the intolerant Hapsburg powers by military intervention. This would
be a different attitude from James' policy of peace through appeasement."49
Or Leah Marcus: "Cymbeline' s Shakespeare is at least more civilized and gentlemanly,
but looks rather too much like an elitist who traffics in Stuart ideology and
iconography out of a misguided belief that such a narrow, particularized vision
can somehow be made compatible with exalted universals like the Ideal of Human
Betterment."50 Assertions
like these amplify Gary Taylor's remark about an earlier commentator's objections
to the militarism of Henry V: "For Hazlitt, literary criticism is the continuation
of politics by other means." Such objections, claims Taylor, "have more to do
with the subsequent history of Europe than with Shakespeare's play."51
And Taylor concludes his own essay with a characterization of Henry as "a study
of human greatness"-- a glorifying portrait of "Will" that can be identified
with Shakespeare himself.52
But surely such a Nietzchean reading is no less anachronistic than the Erasmian
readings Taylor dismisses. Similarly, most recent critics who mention James'
pacifism tend to see it not as a genuine challenge to the martial outlook, but
rather as a tactical stance in the monarch's strategy of power. In this they
follow the Machiavellian teachings of Michel Foucault: "Power is war, a war
continued by other means...none of the phenomena in a political system should
be interpreted except as the continuation of war. They should, that is to say,
be understood as episodes, factions and displacements in that same war. Even
when one writes the history of peace and its institutions, it is always the
history of this war that one is writing".53
A serviceable assumption, perhaps, but not one supportable with evidence. No
more than "subsequent history," does Renaissance history offer any indisputable
ground upon which to base political readings. Just as the Foucauldian cynicism
expounded in many recent studies is challenged by Marxists and feminists who
unearth popular culture and women's voices in the theatre, so can it be challenged
by the evidence of a genuine pacifist culture in which Shakespeare himself played
a part.54

* * *

War vs. Peace was a central
concern of Elizabeth's foreign and domestic policies. Having been educated by
a group of humanist scholars who themselves were students of the London Reformers,
the Queen was inclined to avoid war for humanitarian as well as economic reasons.55
But she didn't hesitate to take a militarist posture to confront the aggressive
conduct of foreign rivals or to strengthen her standing with her subjects. Elizabeth
adopted a "Middle Way" in questions of war and peace as well as in religious
disputes by containing conflicting forces in dynamic tension and by playing
extreme factions against one another to strengthen her own royal authority.56
She balanced tempestuous love-hate relationships with Leicester, Ralegh and
Essex--her flamboyant generals--against steady friendships with William and
Robert Cecil--her prudent Foreign Secretaries. In contrast to the appetite for
battle that drove the three military men who courted her as mistress, the attitude
of the Cecils is summed up in the advice William gave to his son about raising
his grandchildren: "Neither by my consent shall thou train them up to the wars.
For he that setteth up his rest to live by that profession can hardly be an
honest man or good Christian."57

During the Elizabethan
years, Shakespeare's plays reflect this shifting balance. His earliest and "enormously
popular" histories, the three parts of Henry VI with their glorification of
chivalric battle and of English victory over France appealed to the public's
appetite for what Leah Marcus calls a "bloody palimpsest of past and present
militarism." Brought on by the " extreme Francophobia and 'war fever'"58
of the years 1590 and 1592, that appetite had been cultivated during the invasion
of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when the Queen, armored as an Amazon warrior,
addressed her troops at Tilbury: "I am come among you...in the midst and heat
of the battle...rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will take
up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your
virtues in the field."59
This martial performance was memorialized in numerous pictures and poems, among
them James Aske's Elizabethan Triumphans: "Not like to those who coutch on stately
downe,/But like to Mars, the God of fearefull Warre,/And heaving oft to skies
her warlike hands,/Did make herselfe Bellona-like renowned./.../In nought unlike
the Amazonian Queene/Who beating downe amaine the bloodie Greekes,/Thereby to
grapply with Achillis Stout/Even at the time when Troy was sore besieged."60
But after the victory over the Armada, the public's desire for more military
glory was frustrated (and perhaps sharpened) by Elizabeth's refusal to provide
full support for another war against the Catholics in France. She was pressured
into this adventure by her charismatic young general, the Earl of Essex, who
had a great following among "the impecunious younger sons of the squierarchy"
eager for action and plunder.61
After reluctantly agreeing to let him join forces with the Protestant King Henry
IV of France in a siege of Rouen in 1591, she forced Essex to abandon the effort
in l592, when both he and Henry demonstrated frivolous incompetence in battle.
This retreat deepened the rift between those Sir Walter Ralegh called "the men
of war" and "the scribes,"62
and provoked an outpouring of popular militarist tracts and anti-pacifist plays
of which I Henry VI was the most prominent example.63

A few years later, Shakespeare,
like the Queen, seems to have shifted ground and to have adopted some controlled
ambivalence toward Essex's bellicosity in particular and toward the problem
of war in general. The second tetralogy of history plays were written between
1595 and 1599-- the years between the Second Cadiz expedition, when Essex returned
as "this glorious and chivalrous youth ... the personification of England at
war...the people's darling, the Queen's favorite"64
and his expedition to Ireland, when, in the words of Shakespeare's chorus: "...
the general of our gracious empress--/As in good time he may--from Ireland coming/
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,/ How many would the peaceful City
quit/ To welcome him." (5.0.30-34)

This kind of public adulation
of a conquering military hero is staged throughout the tetralogy--in Bolingbroke's
return in Richard II, in the celebration of Prince Hal's victory over the rebels
in I Henry IV, in the Coronation scenes following the second victory in II Henry
IV, and in the choruses of Henry V. Along with these plays' repeated depiction
of heroic glory and military victory as the solution to both political and psychological
problems, the rhetoric of such scenes heightens the war fever inspired by Essex.
On the other hand, these plays introduce a recurrent critique of militarist
behavior absent in the previous tetralogy--in Hotspur's exaggerated sense of
martial honor and Falstaff's mockery of it, in the cynicism of King Henry's
urgings to conduct war abroad to divert attention from problems at home, and
in depictions of corruption in recruitment and commissioning of officers.

The queen hoped to share
both the booty and the glory of Essex's exploits, and yet her reservations remained.
Fifteen ninety six was the third straight year of poor harvests and Elizabeth
had no desire "to increase the financial and human burden of war beyond what
was absolutely necessary... mixed with cries that 'they must not starve, they
will not starve' were more enduring and significant murmurs against the drain
of men for foreign wars."65
Nevertheless, in 1598, when Henri IV invited England to join in a treaty with
France and Spain, Elizabeth refused. After prolonged and heated debate in council
between Robert Cecil and Essex, who insisted on continuing the war, she finally
sided with her general.

This debate in the Queen's
mind, in which hawkish Essex prevailed over dovish Cecil, provides the context
for Henry V. 66 In response
to the "creative irritant" of repeated pacifist objections, this play affirms
war from two distinct militaristic perspectives: the chivalric and the pragmatic.
The choice of this war itself brings with it a double justification. Long before
Shakespeare, Henry V's campaign against France enjoyed the reputation of a holy
war, like Thermopylae or the Red Sea--a war in which national identity was forged
in a violent crucible by the direct intervention of God on the winning side.
This implication of divine redemption is emphasized by King Henry's prayers
to the "God of Battles" on the eve of the encounter and by his humble abjuration
of credit on the morning of victory. On another level, this war's triumph over
France was perceived as a redemption of two worldly debts saddling the English
commonwealth with rebellion and insolvency: Henry IV's usurpation of Richard
II's throne and Prince Hal's robbery of the exchequer.

In chivalric celebration
of war, Shakespeare aims the full blast of his rhetorical power at the audience
of Henry V. The choruses inflame us to collaborate with the author in producing
a spectacle to sweep away thought in a flood of patriotic passion. Along with
the thrills of rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air, he invokes the romantic
appeal of battle as an occasion for displaying mettle under fire in the face
of bad odds. In addition to its emotional appeal, chivalry also provided ethical
rationales for war which this play repeatedly invokes. Since Augustine, the
church had evolved a doctrine of "just war" to regulate the military aristocracy
and to exempt it from Biblical taboos against killing. Justification resided
both in legitimate war aims--jus ad bellum--and in legitimate conduct of fighting--jus
in bello .67 Shakespeare's
Henry is extremely fastidious about securing these justifications, without which,
he avers, his course is one of butchery. Both clergy and council assure him
that his territorial claims on France are supported by the ancient Salique Law
as well by the Book of Numbers. The campaign is presented as an extension of
the legal trial by combat whereby God himself adjudicates a dispute. And both
sides from the start agree to adhere to its outcome, making war a means to establishing
a lasting peace.

In his conduct of fighting,
Henry again takes pains to act only, in his own words, according to "right and
conscience." Before Harfleur he plays exactly by the rules, expressing his concern
for the welfare of non-combatants by offering surrender with no peril to its
citizens. He demonstrates pious respect for Church property in the war zone
by executing his former crony Bardolph for stealing a pax, asserting the chivalric
maxim, " When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is
soonest winner" (3.6.111).

The most chivalric of
rationales for the war is Henry's knightly quest for the hand of the Princess
Katharine. Like Theseus in A Midsummernight's Dream, Henry woos his female antagonist
with his sword and then lays the kingdom he has taken at her feet. "We see very
often," said the French diplomat, Frances Duaren," that as of a comedy, so of
a war, the final conclusion is marriage."68
The generic slide from history to comedy in Act 5 of the play celebrates the
procreative and dynastic convergence that war has brought about in the course
of events. It also extends the happy ending from realms of politics and love
to those aesthetics and epistemology. The serious clatter of battle is replaced
by the playful chatter of courtship; the uncertain open-endedness of chronicle
achieves closure with the final prospect of sexual consummation, and the barriers
to communication and meaning erected by divergences of nationality, gender and
language are dissolved in the lingua franca of Katharine's English and Henry's
French.

The impression given by
this account, however, is remote from the experience of many readers of the
play. It ignores the sharply contrasting tonality of passages in which Shakespeare
seems to repudiate or undermine the chivalric justifications of war. The choruses
and speeches are followed not by the noble deeds they are designed to inspire,
but rather by the cynical, self-serving plotting of the Archbishops in Act 1,
the profiteering plans of the Eastcheap rascals in Act 2, the beating of the
footsoldiers into the breach in Act 3, the questioning of the king's patriotism
by Bates and Williams in Act 4, and the demobilization of Pistol into pickpocket
and beggar in Act 5.69
The legal justifications of war are produced as a quid pro quo for the King's
opposition to a bill in Commons that would expropriate church revenues and devote
them to "relief of lazars and weak age/ Of indigent faint souls past toil/ A
hundred almshouses right well supplied"(1.1.15-17). Soon after parading his
lenity, the "gentler gamester" has the English cut the throats of their prisoners
on stage, and then cries foul when the French murder his own luggage carriers
in reprisal. And Henry's courtship verges at times on rape. To Katharine's reluctance
to love "the ennemi of France," he responds, "I love France so well I will not
part with a village of it" (5.2.170), and he kisses her on the mouth before
marriage against her protests and in deliberate violation of the customs of
her house.

Such contradictions of
the chivalric vision of war force some to read Henry V as anamorphic--having
two distinct and contradictory meanings depending on one's vantage70--and
others to conclude that in it Shakespeare means to criticize militarism with
pacifist irony. My own reading, suggested by that of Stephen Greenblatt, is
that the play undermines chivalric rationales for war, not to attack militarism
itself, but to support it with pragmatic rationales for war that recognize,
answer, and contain the pacifist objections that keep cropping up.71

Thus, the discrepancy
between the high flights of the chorus and the conniving of the Bishops is deliberate;
in the words of Gunter Walch, it "shows the official ideology up for what it
has become: an illusion effectively used as an instrument of power."72
Rather than showing it up, however, I think this play asks us to admire Henry's
effectiveness. It depicts him mobilizing both the chivalric illusions of official
ideology and the cynical self-interestedness of all of his subjects, and it
shows his success at melding those conflicting interests into the common purpose
of making war on France. For most of his subjects believe in chivalric justifications
no more and no less than he does. And like his, their resolve is threatened
by the anti-war arguments they don't dare to articulate. In Act 1's recurring
debates about whether or not to proceed, only the king can take anti-war positions--
in order to generate more pro-war arguments and to tease support from his allies.

Constructed as it is,
that support is one Henry can never trust. Act 2's chorus trumpets that "...honor's
thought/ reigns solely in the breast of every man" (2.0.3-4). This idea is repeated
by Cambridge, Scrope and Grey immediately before Henry exposes them as traitors.
He does so by betraying them more craftily than they betrayed him, declaring
before a multitude that their revolt "...is like/another fall of man" (2.2.138-9).
A politic piety, but also a recognition of the non-chivalric nature of his world,
a world in which no prince can ever trust in people if he is to be trusted as
a prince. Once punished the traitors give thanks to God that Henry has caught
them. People need a devious authority to protect them from themselves. "Trust
none" says Pistol to his wife upon departure for battle (2.3.44).

Like trust, the chivalric
quality of mercy has only relative value in this context. Henry teaches us this
when the traitors deny mercy to a prisoner accused of railing on the king, then
beg mercy for their attempt on his life. Mercy so granted would be cruel. And
cruelty, we see in Act e, the quality explicitly forbidden the chivalric warrior,
can be merciful. The bloodcurdling speech at Harfleur, in which Henry hypocritically
absolves himself of responsibility for the sadistic mayhem of his soldiers --"your
naked infants spitted upon pikes" etc. (3.3.118)--brings about the surrender
of the city and spares immeasureable suffering on both sides. Such pragmatic
rationales for behavior supplement the chivalric jus ad bellum and jus in bello
with the moral imperatives of Realpolitik in a world where success in war is
assumed to lead to peace.

Thus, on the night of
the decisive battle, Henry actually is high- minded as he declares his Machiavellian
ethos: "There is some soul of goodness in things evil.../Thus may we gather
honey from the weed/And make a moral of the devil himself." (4.1.1,12) As he
kisses Katharine against her will, against custom, Henry asserts, "nice customs
curtsy to great kings...We are the makers of manners Kate, and the liberty that
follows our places stops the mouth of all find- faults"(5. 2.263). Henry makes
his own rules in love as well as in war, like the hero of The Prince : "I am
certainly convinced of this: that it is better to be impetuous than cautious,
because Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, in order to deep her down,
to beat her and to struggle with her. And it is seen that she more often allows
herself to be taken over by men who are impetuous than by those who make cold
advances; and then, being a woman, she is always the friend of young men, for
they are less cautious, more aggressive, and they command her with more audacity."73
And like Machiavelli's Fortuna, to this impetuousness and brutality the future
Queen willingly yields.

* * *

Although the verses from
the chorus cited earlier explicitly associate Henry V with Essex, there is no
certainty that Shakespeare intended an analogy between Act 5's courtship and
the Earl's relationship with Elizabeth. At any rate Fortuna's wheel brought
him down from his crest in 1599, just as the play's Epilogue discloses the short-lived
and ultimately futile triumph of its hero: "Fortune made his sword/By which
the world's best garden he achieved/Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned
king/Of France and England, did this king succeed/Whose state so many had the
managing/That they lost France and made his England bleed." Essex's nemesis
resulted from the outcome of the Irish expedition. Despite his having wrested
a huge allocation of troops and money from the Queen and her council, victory
over the native guerrilla forces eluded him. Instead of bringing home rebellion
broached on his sword, he forged a secret plan with his Irish antagonist to
sieze the throne. He was arrested for treason, but the Queen forgave him. A
year later, he gathered a new group of desperate followers and again attempted
a palace coup, after paying Shakespeare's company to stage a special performance
of Richard II, presumably to encourage people to identify him with the successful
rebel, Bolingbroke. But this time the Queen had him executed. As Essex fell,
Robert Cecil rose. While Elizabeth's health declined, he allied himself with
James VI of Scotland, her most likely successor.

Well before her deathbed
appointment of James in 1603, Elizabeth knew of his pacifism. In 1599, the year
of Essex's triumph and tragedy, James had published Basilikon Doron, a guidebook
for princes dedicated to his own son and modelled upon Erasmus' The Education
of a Christian Prince. Like the 1611 edition of his Works, the frontispiece
of this book prominently featured a picture of "Pax" carrying an olive branch
and treading on a figure of vanity staring in the mirror. Whether or not that
figure represents Essex, his brand of swashbuckling militarism went out of favor
during the final Tudor years. Shakespeare likewise shifted his point of view
toward war and peace between 1599 and 1603, the year Troilus and Cressida was
entered in the Stationer's Register.

Troilus forms a companion
piece to Henry V. Instead of glorifying, it condemns war and those who make
it. In the earlier play Shakespeare counters pacifist objections to war with
militarist rationales; here, he counters militarist rationales with pacifist
objections. In reducing war from a providential tool to an instrument of chaos,
he inverts the rhetorical strategies of Henry V and also shrinks the proportions
of epic to the distortions of satire. The chorus of Henry V apologizes for "confining
mighty men" of his story in the "little room" of the theatre, implying that
the members of the audience are midgets in comparison to the heros who will
be portrayed on stage. The prologue of Troilus, on the other hand--"armed, but
not in confidence"-- introduces us to "Princes orgulous" with "chafed blood"
and "ticklish skittish spirits," whom we may "like or find fault as our pleasures
are." Compared to the self-inflated Lilliputians on stage, we spectators are
cast as gods.

The two major sources
of the plot, Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde and Chapman's translation of the
Iliad, suggest the two militaristic ideologies which the play continually invokes
and mocks: medieval Christian chivalry and classical pagan policy. These are
usually associated respectively with the Trojans and the Greeks. The question
of jus ad bellum --what is the just cause for making war?--is deliberated by
the Trojan council just as it is by the king's council in Henry V. But instead
of the legalisms of descent through the female line in marriage, the issue here
becomes a laughable notion of the consortium rights of the rapist as an adequate
casus belli. Paris insists that "the soil of her fair rape" will be "wiped off
in honorable keeping of her," and Troilus, "the Prince of Chivalry," argues
that to let her go back to her husband and thereby end the war would be as disloyal
as betraying one's own wife(2.2.146, 65). When Priam, Helenus and Cassandra
point out the fallacies in these arguments and Hector warns against the double
evil of violating the laws of marriage and the laws of nations, Troilus rejects
reason itself in favor of "manhood and honor": "Manhood and honor/ Should have
hare hearts, would they but fat their thoughts/ with this crammed reason. Reason
and respect/ Make livers pale and lustihood deject"(2.2.45-8). Emphasizing the
very absence of jus ad bellum and the consequent immorality and irrationality
of making war, Hector ignores his own reasoning, abruptly reverses his position,
and goes off with Troilus to celebrate their coming victory.

The chivalric Trojans
do no better when it comes to jus in bello, the manner of conducting war. "Humane
gentleness"(4.1.22) is forever on their lips; they treat the Greeks with courtly
manners during the duels and parties that precede the battle; and Hector graciously
refrains from taking advantage of Achilles after getting the better of him in
their first encounter. But in the next moment he hunts a nameless fleeing soldier
only "for thy hide," and kills him for his sumptuous armor. As he curses the
corpse and disarms himself, he is immediately butchered by Achilles' gang of
Myrmidons, and dies a hideous ignoble death.

Like Spenser's knights
in The Faerie Queene, Henry V fought "fierce wars" for "faithful loves" in pursuit
of the romantic ideal also proclaimed by the warriors in Troilus and Cressida
: "may that soldier a mere recreant prove/ That means not, hath not, or is not
in love"(1.3.284). But actually, as Thersites observes, "all the argument is
for a cuckold and a whore." Not every woman in the play, but the two over whom
men do battle, are accurately thus described. Helen and Cressida must flirt
as much Ajax and Achilles must fight. Teasing her new lover Diomedes while her
old lover Troilus spies on them, Cressida moralizes against her own treachery
much as Hector had done earlier: "The error of our mind directs our mind--O
then conclude/ Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude"(5.2.108-110). It
is this vile behavior of hers that makes Troilus a great warrior--out of despair,
not out of love, which at the opening of the play had kept him home at peace.74

The justice of the Greeks'
war aims in reclaiming Helen is never mentioned; their militaristic rationales
are not chivalric. But their two Machiavellian mechanisms of policy, force and
fraud, are set at odds in the struggle between Achilles and Ulysses, the lion
and the fox. Thus split, the Greeks are as incapable of achieving their own
purely pragmatic purposes for war--morale, prestige, and conquest--as the Trojans
are incapable of achieving honor and love. Achilles refuses to exert his strength,
not so much because his pride is injured as because no personal wound has yet
mobilized his fury. Ulysses' grand speech against faction slyly promotes faction
as the antidote to faction, but unlike the choruses and speeches of Henry V,
it fails as an ideological strategem. The tactics of robbing robbers or betraying
betrayers that Henry used to such advantage backfire in this war, because here
human motivations are too irrational and actual situations are too indeterminate
to be controlled by such deliberate manipulation. As Thersites again observes:
"the policy of these crafty-swearing rascals...is proved not worth a blackberry,
whereupon the Grecians begin to proclaim barbarism and policy grows into an
ill opinion" (5.4.10). What finally draws the Greeks together is the "barbarous"
fury of Troilus and Hector: "now good or bad," says the prologue, "tis but the
chance of war."

In the religious mythologies
of military cultures, war itself is often conceptualized as a cosmic struggle
against chance or chaos, the effort to create or protect meaning itself.75
So Henry's providential war confers meaning on earlier English history as well
as on the confused economic, political and psychic energies of his own time.
Pacifists tend to associate war with just the opposite tendency--the breakdown
of meaning, the triumph of the random. This process of metaphysical decomposition
is a central preoccupation of Troilus and Cressida. It is manifest in the confusion
of predator and prey, whereby appetite eventually eats up itself (l.3), in the
erosion of satisfaction by sexual desire that is either negated by achievement
(1.2.274) ) or infinite in craving (3.2.75); in the dissolution of moral responsibility
by both social pressure (3.3. 115) and by solipsistic relativism (2.2. 199);
in the separation of words from their meanings in the long-winded, mutually
flattering speeches of the generals; and in the abrogations of the fundamental
principles of logic--the laws of identity and of contradiction: "If there be
rule in unity itself/This was not she. O madness of discourse/ That cause sets
up with and against itself" (5.2.141).

These abstract depictions
of chaos are reflected in the psychological disintegration of all the major
characters. In the minds of Troilus, Cressida, Hector, Ulysses, and Achilles,
the powers of reason, will, appetite and action are themselves warring factions
that result in inconsistent, driven, self destructive behavior. "Why should
I war without the walls of Troy/ That find such cruel battle here within?" are
Troilus first words. Some critics have seen a positive progression in his development
toward a committed fighter at the end of the play, but his last words--"Hope
of revenge shall hide our inward woe"-- suggest a negative parody of Hal's development
from barfly to general. Troilus has succeeded only in projecting his inner disorder
outward and inflicting it on the world. This process illustrates Renaissance
pacifist theories of the origins of war in psychological disorders: "I failed,"
says Erasmus' Peace "to discover even one who did not fight within himself.
Reason wars with inclinations; inclination struggles with inclination;...lust
desires one thing, anger another; ambition wants this, covetousness that."76

The epilogue of the play
expresses the same vengeful need to project inner disorder onto the world, as
Pandarus seeks relief from the aches of his venereal illness by bequeathing
it to the audience. Shakespeare reinforces the notion that war is a pathology
rather than a proving ground for virtue by making the dominant image cluster
of Troilus and Cressida that of contagious disease infecting both the individual
and the society. In his study of this pattern in the play, Eric Mallin has pointed
to an underlying similarity between war and epidemic as impasses to understanding.
"A proliferating and uncontrollable chaos has the same effect upon interpretation
as on authority...they summon yet frustrate it."77
Both war and disease, he suggests, resemble the turbulent "chaos systems" studied
by contemporary mathematicians and physicists. The randomness and indeterminacy
of such systems characterize not only the world of war that Troilus and Cressida
represents, but the play's literary form as well. Just as the fight at Troy
has no beginning, middle or end, individual battles and the play's other stories
of love and revenge lack both climax and closure, for they embody the incomprehensible
futility of human beings trapped in a maze of their own device.78

In Book I of Utopia and
in the colloquy, "Charon," More and Erasmus mock the rationales of militarism
with the voices of Hythloday and Polygraphus. Possessed of common sense and
sound conscience in a world gone mad, these marginal characters are regarded
as fools by their fellows but as prophets by their readers. Two such wise fools
whose authority is likewise masked appear in Troilus and Cressida bearing the
same message--Thersites the Greek slave and Cassandra the Trojan woman. Unlike
Henry, they need not act, and perhaps because of this they speak a simple truth:
he with disgusted rage--"all wars and lechery!"--and she with quiet despair--
"yet soft, Hector, I take my leave/ thou dost thyself and all our Troy deceive"
(5.3.89-90). As he passes from Henry V to Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare
not only hearkens back to the precedents of More and Erasmus, he represents
the unconventional pacifist outlook of a King who was known to one of his contemporaries
as "God's Silly Vassal," and to another as "the wisest fool in Christendom."79

It is the fool's perspective--the
perspective of an outsider critical of assumptions that in general are taken
for granted--that marks Troilus and Cressida 's genre of satire. A year after
the play's first appearance, another anti-militarist satire called Don Quixote
was published in the nation that most Englishmen thought of as their "natural
enemy."80 That same year
King James made a lasting peace treaty with Spain.

* * *

After 1603 the Jacobean
theatre took on a strong pacifist slant that reflected "the influence of the
King's assertive political creed."81
Most modern scholars insist that this shift in perspective results from the
playwrights' "tactful heed to one of [the] sovereign's most deeply felt convictions,"82
but one might also argue that such a reassertion of Stoic, Christian and Humanist
attitudes about war and peace began to flourish simply because they were no
longer repressed, or because people had become disillusioned with military heroics
after the fall of Essex, or because James' educational program as philosopher-king
was actually working. Whatever its mechanism, the cultural shift toward pacifism
influenced Jacobean plays in a variety of ways.

Anti-war satires went
beyond poking fun at the swaggering soldier of traditional comedy and mocked
the chivalric traditions that a crisis-ridden hereditary aristocracy revived
to bolster morale and that Elizabeth had invoked to muster support for resistance
to Spain. Linda Woodbridge notes that in "The Iron Age," the last two plays
of his Homeric Cycle, Thomas Heywood "is not less cynical about the Trojan War
than was Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. Hector is killed in an unsportsmanlike
manner, Achilles by treachery and guile; the Greeks' victory is achieved through
a cheap trick conceived by a perjured coward...virtually the only survivors
of the holocaust are the two characters who, never pretending to courage, refused
to fight: Thersites and Synon. ... military values seem utterly repudiated."83
In addition to mocking with satire, Jacobean playwrights also discredited those
who expressed hostility to peace by turning them into melodramatic villains.
Chapman's, Byron, for instance, repudiates the "sensual peace" which "confounds
Valour and cowardice, fame and infamy," while in The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois,
a provocateur "politician" manipulates his victim with antipacifist demagogy:
"Now all is peace, no danger: now what follows?/Idleness rusts us, since no
virtuous labour /Ends ought rewarded" (1.1.32). Another villain in Cyril Tourneur's
The Atheist's Tragedy deceives his nephew into going off to battle with an appeal
to "noble warre" as the "first originall Of all man's honour," and with "regrets
about how his age has fallen from this ideal." Similarly , the true villain
of Shakespeare's Cymbeline , Cloten, is condemned as advocate of war against
Rome and as an opponent of his king's peacemaking policies.84
These villains bear an interesting resemblance to Puritan preachers who agitated
against James' rapprochements with the Catholics. For example, one Thomas Scott
wrote a widely distributed tract, Vox Populi, which claimed to be a translation
of the Spanish ambassador's dispatch reporting plans in progress to overthrow
the Church of England, though it was, in fact, a complete fabrication.85
Just as in the earlier plays like Henry V or Tamburlaine, pacifist views provided
an "irritant" to stimulate militarist rebuttal, so, in the Jacobean theatre,
militarist sentiments provided an occasion to reaffirm the dominant anti-war
position.

A more tactful form of
pacifist persuasion is found in Ben Jonson's dramatic masque, Prince Henry's
Barriers , presented at court to James' son, an avid aficionado of chivalry.
First "Chevalry" speaks the familiar call to revive the neglected art of war:
"Breake you rustie dores That have so long beene shut, and from the shores/Of
all the world, come knight-hood like a flood/Upon these lists, to make the field,
here, good, /And your owne honours, that are now call'd forth/Against the wish
of men to prove your worth."

But he is answered by
sage Merlin, who takes the final word: "Nay stay your valure, tis a wisdome
high/In Princes to use fortuen reverently./He that in deeds of Armes obeyes
his blood/Doth often tempt his destinie beyond good./Look on this throne, and
in his temper view/The light of all that must have grace in you:/His equall
Iustice, upright Fortitude/And settled Prudence, with that Peace indued/Of face,
as minde, alwayes himselfe and even." 86
Merlin retains some respect for the language and sensibilities of the chivalric
revival, but like the London Reformers of the previous century, he deflates
its enthusiasm for battle by insisting that "Valure" be stayed, that deeds of
Armes be restrained, and that the Prince concern himself with Peace.

If war is no longer validated
either by a heroic tradition or by the arguments of Realpolitik, one is forced
to confront the question of why human beings continue to wage it and suffer
its attendant disasters. By seeking the answer to this question with the analytical
and educational approach to social action of the old Christian Humanists, Jacobean
writers undertook pyschological and political studies of warriors and war-oriented
societies in the attempt to understand and reform them. Many of their plays
depict the demise of great military heros, not through the triumph of superior
arms, but through failures of insight, compassion, and self-control attributable
to an identity forged in battle.

Othello, for example,
though possessing the martial virtues of "the plain soldier," is shown to lack
the learning necessary to exert self- mastery and leadership in civil society.
His deprecatory self- description turns out ironically accurate when it comes
to his inability to communicate with anyone but Iago: "Rude am I in my speech,/And
little bless'd with the soft phrase of peace...And little of the great world
can I speak/More than pertains to feats of broils and battles" (1.3.81). Following
Jorgensen we can contrast the uneasy resonances of this soldierly plain-speaking
with that of Henry V, whose protests of ineptitude with language and of inability
to deal with women in Act 5 merely disguise a supreme self confidence in the
realms of diplomacy and courtship grounded in battlefield valor.87
Othello's confidence too is based on war, but the base is shaky and the support
is portrayed as dependency. His prowess leaves him defenseless against those
who prey upon him and dangerous to those he should protect. Even his very identity
as a soldier is shattered by his underlying personal, sexual, and social insecurity:

O now forever

Farewell the tranquil
mind! farewell content!

Farewell the plumed troops
and the big wars

That makes ambition virtue.
O Farewell!

Farewell the neighing
steed and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum,
th' ear piercing fife

the royal banner, and
all quality,

Pride, pomp, and circumstance
of glorious war!

And O! you mortal engines,
whose rude throats

The immortal Jove's dread
clamors counter feit

Farewell! Othello's occupations's
gone. (3.3.347)

The weakness underlying
his strength is revealed in his responses to his misperceived betrayal by
his wife and to his accurately perceived betrayal by his subaltern. "An honorable
murderer" he calls himself (5.2.294), and asks that his suicide be remembered
as a service to the state.

But while the audience
of Troilus and Cressida regarded Hector's fallacious "honor" as mere self-deception
and Troilus' valor as nihilistic rage, our response to Othello's defects is
more complex. Even at his blindest and cruelest moments, we, like Desdemona,
tend to commiserate with rather than condemn the Moor. And our strongest emotional
response, created by the play's rhetoric of suspense, is to call out repeatedly
to the character, "Don't do it, don't let yourself be trapped into a stupid
game of violence." Just as we warn, so to some degree are we being warned by
a monitory and didactic intent which moves us toward a rejection of martial
heroism, yet which still acknowledges some of its values. The cost of this shift
in values was great for a culture as heavily invested in militarism as seventeenth
century Christendom. Insofar as their "occupation's gone," Shakespeare's Jacobean
heros--Othello, Timon, Macbeth, Anthony, Lear and Coriolanus--sustain a tragic
loss; but insofar as those heros are shown to be brutal, driven, and anachronistic,
Shakespeare displays that loss as a inevitable and progressive sacrifice.

Jorgensen sees the thematic
preoccupation with the contradiction between the soldier and society as an expression
of Shakespeare's resistance to James: "Jacobean pacifism and the reaction to
Essex's rebellion had indeed made the soldier's place in the story a less comfortable
one. But...the position was by no means indefensible and certainly not ignoble.
Soldier citizens of this caliber could no longer claim a political endorsement,
but they still exhibited an integrity and largeness of spirit that lifted them
above their meaner adversaries as subjects for tragic drama"(314). In contrast,
I see James' influence as liberating. The king's consistent theory and successful
practice of peace between 1603 and 1613 encouraged Shakespeare to continue in
the direction he was already heading, stimulated his investigations into the
pathology of socially sanctioned violence, and motivated him to use the theatre
to reeducate his audience.

Of all the plays, Coriolanus
carries forward this effort in the most concerted manner. The satirical aspect
of the play has been observed by many. G.B. Shaw called it "the greatest of
Shakespeare's comedies,"88
while Oscar Campbell classifies it as "tragical satire."89
The thrust of the satire has been interpreted variously: by right- leaning critics
as an attack on the plebeian mob whose self-seeking opportunism brings a principled
and noble patrician to destruction, and by left-leaning critics as an attack
on the aristocracy for their uncontrollable hatred of the proletariat they exploit.
Campbell sees the commons and the patrician hero equally at fault and regards
the play as an attack on class conflict itself, a conflict which violates the
Tudor myth of degree and hierarchy articulated in Menenius' extended metaphor
of the state as organic body.90
I believe, however, that as political satire, the play makes most sense when
it is regarded, like Troilus and Cressida, as an attack on the bellicose policies
and attitudes which create the war that provides the framework of the play's
action.

That war is portrayed
not in terms of glamor, glory, or heroism. but rather as cruel butchery. In
the words of G. Wilson Knight, "War here is violent, metallic, impactuous...
Here human ambition attains its height by splitting an opponent's body, the
final signature of honour is the robe and reeking caparison of blood...it is
heavy throughout, and strikes a note of harshness peculiar to this play ...
even war's nobility is always a thing of violence, blood, cruelty, bought at
the expense of others' misery ...And the noblest of warriors, Coriolanus, is
almost an automaton in fight, a slaying-machine of mechanic excellence...His
nobility is poisoned by pride...his wars are not for Rome; they are an end in
themselves."91 The play
criticizes war by repeatedly showing how military violence takes on a life of
its own, severed from its purposes and justifications. The heroic Coriolanus
switches from the defender of his city to its attacker because of a personal
grievance: "O world thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn...on a dissention
of a doit, break out/ To bitterest enmity: so fellest foes/...by some chance/Some
trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends/and interjoin their issues"
(4.4.12). And his erstwhile opponents, " patient fools/Whose children he hath
slain," ignore their enmity and " their base throats tear/With giving him glory"
(5.6. 50).

These Volsicans are cast
into the role of warmongers throughout the play. No less than Coriolanus and
their own aristocratic general, Aufidius, the proletarians of Antium hate peace
and relish battle for its own sake:

2 Servingman: Why
then we shall have a stirring world

again. This peace is nothing
but to rust iron, increase tailors, and

breed ballad makers."

1 Servingman:Let
me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as

far as day does night;
it's sprightly, waking, audible and full of

vent. Peace is a very
apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf sleepy,

insensible; a getter of
more bastard children than war's a

destroyer of men.

2 Servingman: Tis
so: and as war in some sort may be said

to be a ravisher, so it
cannot be denied but peace is a great

maker of cuckolds.

1 Servingman: Ay,
and it makes men hate one another.

3 Servingman: Reason:
because they then less need one

another. The wars for
my money... .(4.5.223 -238)

Such sentiments, which
echo the anti-pacifist pronouncements of Elizabethan military alarmists like
Barnabe Rich and Robert Wilson, are strongly discredited by being attributed
to characters who, if not villains, evoke the least of the audience's sympathy.
By contrast, as Ann Barton observes, the peace-loving Roman commons are presented
with approval: "this play is unique in the canon for the tolerance and respect
it accords an urban citizenry."92
Their role in the play opens with an airing of legitimate grievances against
the war policy of the patricians which links it to economic exploitation:
"the object of our misery is as an inventory to particularize their abundance;
our sufferance is a gain to them...If the wars eat us not up, they will"(1.1.20-80).
Their role concludes with their celebration of the end of hostilities with
the Volsicans and their reconciliation with the patricians after Coriolanus
has been tamed. (5.5)

As in his other late tragedies,
in Coriolanus Shakespeare goes beyond mockery and condemnation to study the
causes of war. Following Erasmus' path, he traces the causes of political violence
to psychological aggression. Even before Coriolanus' first appearance, a citizen
suggests the connection between the general's battlefield heroics and domestic
neurosis: "Though soft-conscience'd men can be content to say it was for his
country, he did it partly to please his mother and to be proud..." (1.1.37).
This diagnosis is confirmed by modern psychoanalytic critics like Janet Adelman:
"...the whole of his masculine identity depends on his transformation of his
vulnerability into an instrument of attack...The rigid masculinity that Coriolanus
finds in war becomes a defense against acknowledgment of his neediness; ..in
order to avoid being the soft, dependent, feeding parasite, he has to maintain
his rigidity as soldier's steel... ."93
As the play proceeds, the more he seeks to confirm his manhood in battle, the
more infantilized he becomes.

Like Macbeth's, Coriolanus'
compulsive need to fight results largely from his vulnerability to the influence
of a woman's vicarious aggression. His mother, Volumnia, is introduced as a
horrifying creature, like Allecto, the Fury, or Bellona, goddess of war: "if
my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he
won honour than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love...had
I a dozen sons...I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one
voluptuously surfeit out of action...the breasts of Hecuba/ when she did suckle
Hector, looked not lovelier/than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood/at
Grecian sword, contemning"(1.3.20-80). For such a perverse mother, as Adelman
says, "Blood is more beautiful than milk, the wound than the breast, warfare
than peaceful feeding"(131). Volumnia's influence bears fruit in the child's
as well as the grandchild's upbringing: "O my word the father's son...I saw
him run after a gilded butterfly...catched it again: or whether his fall enraged
him, or how twas, he did so set his teeth, and tear it; O I warrant how he mammocked
it!" (1.3.58).

In the course of this
soldier's rearing, cruelty displaces tenderness. Coriolanus' martial opponent,
Aufidius, has had a similar rearing, and the erotic energy displaced in both
explodes in their single-sex embrace: "Let me twine/ Mine arms about that body,
.../...here I clip/ The anvil of my sword, and do contest/ as hotly and as nobly
with thy love/as ever in ambitious strength I did/contend against thy valor.
... that I see thee here/thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart/than when
I first my wedded mistress saw/bestride my threshhold. .../...Thou hast beat
me out/Twelve several times, and I have nightly since/Dreamt of encounters 'twixt
thself and me; /we have been down together in my sleep/unbuckling helms, fisting
each other's throat... and pouring war/into the bowels of ungrateful Rome/Like
a bold flood o'erbear it"(4.5.109-135). This graphic sado- masochistic fantasy
portrays the pathological mixture of pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship
and enmity that constitutes the warrior's inner life. The deficiencies of the
military identity are epitomized in Coriolanus' own idea of who he is. Rather
than a person who can experience his common "kindness" with other human beings,
he conceives of himself at once as a mere fighting machine at their disposal
--"make you a sword of me" (1.6.52)--and at the same time as a god--"I'll never/
be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand/as if a man were author of himself/
and knew no other kin" (5.3.34).

As well as psychologically
aberrant, Coriolanus portrays the soldier's personality as historically atavistic.
This last of the tragedies is not only a satire but also a history play. Its
chief source, Plutarch's "Life of Coriolanus," memorializes a past time when
"'valiantness was honored in Rome above all other vertues.'"94
But, as Barton notes, the tragedy departs significantly from Plutarch's idealized
vision of Coriolanus' society. By incorporating elements of Livy's and Machiavelli's
historical accounts of Coriolanus' career into the play, Shakespeare depicts
Rome's transition from an aristocratic military culture toward an urban republic
which eventually will balance the claims of patricians and plebs, of war and
peace, in a contained, constructive tension:
"Livy makes this clear ... it is ...a society which no longer...is based...primarily
upon an ethos of war...Whatever the case in the past, or among the Volscians
of the present, valour in this Rome is no longer "the chiefest virtue," overriding
all the rest. ...the patricians depended upon war as a way of stifling civic
dissension, busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels in order to keep them
distracted from injustices and inequalities at home. ..Sometimes, this strategy
worked, uniting Rome temporarily against a foreign foe. But increasingly, over
the years, it did not."95
Shakespeare's Volsican society appears primitive and barbarous by contrast to
his Rome. The commoners there are neither tradesmen nor citizens but only servants;
the senate merely rubberstamps the decisions of Aufidius, the strongman general;
his henchmen murder Coriolanus with impunity; and women have no voice whatsoever.
In Rome, on the other hand, the commons "would really prefer, in Sicinius's
words, to be 'singing in their shops and going/About their functions friendly'
(4.6.8-9).\ For these small shopkeepers and traders, orange sellers, makers
of taps for broaching wine-barrels... had far rather pursue their normal peacetime
occupations than be out slitting Volscian throats."96
Such a preference accords with the more bourgeois, pacific values praised by
Jonson's Merlin in Prince Henry's Barriers when he describes the contributions
of King Edward III to the mercantile industry as preferable to a chivalric quest
for the golden fleece: "This was he erected first/ The trade of clothing, by
which art were nursed/ Whole millions to his service, and relieved/ So many
poor, as sinced they have believed/ the golden fleece, and need no foreign mine
(185-9)."97 But like the
Volsicans, Coriolanus has nothing but contempt for tailors and balladmakers.
Only he, among all the patricians, refuses to acknowledge the growing influence
and the changing role of the plebs in the economic and political life of the
city.98 His rigid subscription
to antique military values is portrayed as reactionary blindness rather than
principled nobility.

In addition to mocking,
criticizing and analysing militarism, Coriolanus demonstrates the possibility
of stemming the tides of war and civil strife set in motion by its excesses.
Its depiction of Rome's transformation from a warlike to a more pacific society
recapitulates the evolution of England's foreign policy as well as of Shakespeare's
political position between the early 1590's and 1608. The structure of the play's
plot and its manipulation of dramatic tension induce the audience to move in
a parallel direction. When they want to have him elected to political office,
both his friends and his mother regret having intensified Coriolanus' hatred
of the commons and the Volsicans. In the third act they belatedly try to teach
him the peacetime virtues of tact and compromise: "You are too absolute ...I
have heard you say / honor and policy like unsevered friends/ I th' war do grow
together: grant that and tell me/ In peace what each of them by th' other lose/
That they combine not there. Throng our large temples with the shows of peace/And
not our streets with war "(3.3.36). After having created such a Frankenstein
monster, mother Rome and mother Volumnia discover the difficulty of taming it.
At first the general acquiesces to the civilians, but provoked by the tribunes
of the people, he loses control over himself altogether, insults them so intemperately
that he is banished for treason, and ends up joining the enemy Volsicans, allowing
his hatred of the plebs to extend to hatred of his own family. As he threatens
revenge against the whole city of Rome in the last act, peace is given a second
chance. At her son's tent in the camp of the besieging army, Volumnia abjures
both force and policy and invokes the agency of mercy: "Our suit /is that you
reconcile them: while the Volsces/May say 'this mercy we have showed' the Romans/This
we received;' and each in either side/give the all-hail to thee, and cry 'Be
blest/for making up this peace.'"

This conversion scene
of recognition and reversal displays the mother's ability to pacify her son
with the persuasive force of language. The power of her love overcomes his hate,
just as the power of her eloquence overcomes his refusal to speak: "Coriolanus
[holds her by the hand silent]: Mother, mother O/you have won a happy victory
to Rome; /But for your son.../Most dangerously hast thou with him prevailed/If
not most mortal to him....I'll frame convenient peace" ... Ladies, you deserve/To
have a temple built you. All the swords /In Italy, and her confederate arms,/Could
not have made this peace" (5.3.183-209). The cruel warrior has been transformed
into a merciful emissary of peace who will approach the Volsicansc with humility
and tact, subordinating his own mixed feelings to the requirements of his diplomatic
mission.

This transformation is
emphasized by the agonizingly prolonged moment of suspense indicated in the
stage direction, a moment which also moves the audience from rejection to affirmation
of peace. The same theatrical tactic of suspense is reinforced in the next scene,
set back in Rome. Here patricians and plebs reproach one another while awaiting
a common death at the hands of the Volsicans, having abandoned hope that Coriolanus
will ever relent: "there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male
tiger; that shall our poor city find." One messenger brings further bad news
that the plebs are turning on their own tribunes. But then comes the word that
"the ladies have prevailed," followed by a grand outpouring of celebration.
The patrician response of Menenius-- "This Volumnia/Is worth of consuls, senators,
patricians,/A city full; of tribunes such as you/A sea and land full" (5.4.52
)--is echoed by Sicinius, the tribune of the people: "We'll meet them/ And help
the joy"( 5.4.63). The class conflict is resolved --for the moment at least--by
the glorious outbreak of peace. Thus the dramatic climax of Shakespeare's play
enacts James' emblem: the triumph of Eirene over Mars.

Had the play ended here,
without its short final scene, it clearly would have fallen within the classification
of tragicomedy. However, Shakespeare concluded as he did, not only to follow
his classical sources but also to deepen the play's political message. In several
respects, the conversion from war to peace is difficult and painful--in a word,
tragic. Displaying those tragic costs as worthwhile can enhance rather than
negate the value of such a conversion. Harshly contrasting with the brief and
sacred social harmony of the fifth scene of Act 5 , the final scene appalls
us with the horror of political violence. Irresistible aggression bursts the
dikes of Coriolanus' self- restraint and drives the Volsican populace to shout
"kill, kill, kill, kill him"; it cannot be contained by the Second Lord's attempt
to allow the embassy simply to be heard: "Peace ho! no outrage, peace!/The man
is noble, and his fame folds in/This orb o' th' earth. /His last offenses to
us/Shall have judicious hearing. Stand, Aufidius,/And trouble not the peace"
(123-7). But in fact it is not primarily irrational instinct--the iras, or ire
of classical epic--that causes the final debacle. Rather, it is Aufidius' calculated
manipulation that pushes both Coriolanus and the mob beyond the breaking point.
The conspiracy of his hawkish political "faction" torpedoes the peace process,
a process which otherwise might well have completed the conversion of both former
anti-pacifist parties. In this concluding scene, then, the playwright doesn't
undermine our newfound sympathy with Coriolanus, as many critics have maintained;
rather he makes the protagonist into something of a martyr.99
But regardless of one's response to the manner of Coriolanus' death, its fact
signals a positive rather than a negative outcome of the play, a progression
to a new kind of society. Had Coriolanus not given in to his mother's pleadings,
his "manhood" might have been spared, but only at the expense of the lives of
all the men, women and children in Rome. Had he not lost his composure at the
final moment, he might have avoided the rage of the Volsican mob, but Aufidius
would have had him killed anyway. 100
The "sense of pain and anxiety" that Janet Adelman says we are left with at
the end101 is outweighed
by our admiration for Coriolanus' conversion and consequent death, because they
usher in a peace between Volsicans and Romans and between patricians and plebs.102

* * *

Coriolanus ' enactment
of the reversal from hate to love and from war to peace foreshadows the conversions
and reconciliations of protagonists of the late romances like Leontes and Prospero.
The happy endings of these plays expand the festive moment of Volumnia's return
to Rome with masquelike pageantry, and while maintaining a political theme,
shift the tonality and setting of the performance to one of spectacle and magic,
the typical style of Jacobean court entertainment. Elaborating images of harvest
bounty, fertility and prosperity--iconography traditionally associated with
Eirene--the romance plots resolve political tensions in opulent celebrations
combining seedtime and harvest in honor of the marriage of offspring of rulers
formerly at war. Such hoped-for outcomes guided James' foreign policy, as he
negotiated armistice between the Low Countries and Spain and marriages of his
children into both Prodestant and Catholic royal families.

Within this framework,
Shakespeare's last plays function as propaganda for peace. James himself might
well have written an introduction to any one of them containing sentiments like
those in his prefatory note to Middleton's "The Peacemaker": "To all our true-
loving and Peace-embracing Subjects...All that is required of us from you, is
a faithful and hearty welcome...For peace that hath been a stranger to you,
is now become a sister, a dear and natural sister; and to your holiest loves
we recommend her."103
As Linda Woodbridge points out in her recent essay, "Palisading the Body Politic,"
the twenty year rule of James forms an "intercalary period" in British history,
a respite between the obsessive fear of invasion during Elizabeth's reign and
the manic aggression of expansionist imperialism and civil war which was to
follow. Cymbeline is set during another such intercalary period and glorifies
the reconciliation of Britain and Rome --implicitly of Protestant and Catholic--in
a treaty embodying James' ideals of kingship: the peace of Augustus and the
peace of Christ: "Publish we this peace/ To all our subjects. Set we forward;
let/ A Roman and a British ensign wave/ Friendly together..../...Never was a
war did cease/ Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace"(5.5.477-84).

Jonathan Goldberg sees
in this conclusion an exemplar of "James' own self-proclaimed style: the 'style
of the gods'"104. But
in addition to the pomposity of his public persona, James had another style
which also served his quest for peace. It was that of "the wisest fool in Christendom":
coarse, self-indulgent, tolerant, amiable, loving and self- effacing. In 1621
he confided to Parliament: "I will not say I have governed as well as [Elizabeth]
did, but I may say we have had as much peace in our time as in hers."105
A king who speaks like this may recall the humanist schoolmaster Duke at the
end of The Tempest who finds that "the rarer action is/in virtue than in vengeance,"
who releases his thralls and enemies, who relinquishes magic, and who acknowledges
"this thing of darkness" as his own. A number of modern critics contest any
description of Prospero as humane with evidence of the domineering, manipulative,
patriarchal, and cruel aspects of his character and of his island regime. All
of these traits might also be attributed to James Stuart and his rule of Britain.
Nevertheless at the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare takes pains to dramatize
Prospero's "conversion" into a self-ironic, merciful and peaceable sovereign
who still retains his awesome and irresistable aura. This is a model of the
prince after which James seems to have fashioned himself; it is also a model
for the portrait of the ruler in The Famous History of the Life of King Henry
the Eighth..

After the suggestive farewell
to the theatre that closes The Tempest, the last play included in the First
Folio has seemed so disappointing to many commentators that they have sought
to deny Shakespeare's authorship of it.106
But in the framework of the emergent pacifist outlook explored here, Henry VIII
remains an appropriate final work. In it, Shakespeare returns to the genre of
history play he abandoned after Henry V. But this is prophetic rather than political
history, history governed not by violence and chance but rather by reason and
purpose-- history that has eschewed the Machiavellian improvisations of the
second tetralogy, has absorbed the revulsion against war of Troilus and Cressida,
has purged the military anti-heros of the late tragedies, and has incorporated
the redemptive pattern of romance into a combination that Samuel Schoenbaum
calls "festive history."107
In it the theatrical spectacles of battle are replaced by those of pageantry.108

Whereas in the second
tetralogy, Shakespeare presented the king as warrior, in Henry VIII he portrayed
the king as peacemaker. Rather than busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels,
this Henry is committed to peace in international relations. The treaty with
Francis I that he celebrates in the Field of the Cloth of Gold tournament is
abandoned not because of his decision but because of his foreign minister's
secret betrayal. As Shakespeare tells it, the Emperor Charles paid Wolsey to
breach the peace to allay fears that " England and France might through their
amity/ Breed him some prejudice" (1.1.181-2). When this betrayal comes to light,
the motive for conducting war is unmasked as Wolsey's private greed rather than
the public interest. In addition to accepting Charles' bribe, Wolsey has raked
off profits from the defense budget, at harsh cost to the citizenry: "The subject's
grief/ Comes through commisions, which compels from each/ The sixth part of
his substance, to be levied/ Without delay; and the pretense for this/ Is named
your wars in France " (1.2. 56-59). The Erasmian equation of militarism, greed,
economic injustice and political instability is pressed further as Katharine
reports rebellion in the provinces in the form of war tax refusals: "This makes
bold mouths/Tongues spit their duties out, and cold hearts freeze/Allegiance
in them. Their curses now /Live where their prayers did, and it's come to pass/This
tractable obedience is a slave /To each incensed will" (59-67). Instead of sending
a force to punish these rebels as Henry IV might have done, Henry VIII recognizes
the justice of the grievance, lifts the tax, and pardons the protestors:

The method of peacemaking
rather than warmaking also guides Henry's palace politics. Instead of being
decided by bloodshed, conflicts are resolved without violence. The king's
antagonists willingly yield to his authority and he forgives them--as in the
cases of Buckingham, Katharine and Wolsey-- and the king produces compromise
between competing factions of his supporters--as in the rivalry between them
and Archbishop Cranmer.

Such hagiographic tribute
to the king has seemed to some modern commentators like a form of kowtowing
unworthy of Shakespeare's stature. Others have cited it to proclaim that Shakespeare's
lifelong political agenda was to apologize for royal authority and beat the
drum for British nationalism.110
But on the basis of the evidence presented here, one could also argue that after
1599, Shakespeare's own abhorrence of war became steadily more emphatic and
that his enthusiastic support for James stemmed at least partially from his
own desire to further the king's peacemaking mission. It is true that after
Shakespeare's death, James' continuing endeavors in this cause could not forestall
the tragic outbreaks of either the Thirty Years War, in the latter days of his
reign, or of the English civil war, during the reign of his son. Nevertheless,
by recovering the early Humanists' rejection of military politics, culture,
and ideology, both the mature Shakespeare and his royal benefactor strengthened
a fragile tradition that too often remains ignored or denied.

The fullest identification
between Henry, James, Shakespeare and the ideal of peace occurs at the end of
the play in Cranmer's prophecy. It links the king through his newborn daughter,
Elizabeth Tudor, to his descendant, James I, and claims for the past, present
and future of their dynasty James' own personal motto: Beati Pacifici-- Blessed
are the Peacemakers:

In her days every man
shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants, and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors...
So shall she leave her blessedness to one...
Who from the sacred ashes of her honor
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was
And so stand fixed. Peace, plenty love truth , terror
That were the servants to this chosen infant,
shall then be his and like a vine grow to him...
...our children's children
shall see this and bless heaven." (5.5.33-54)

These words offer their
listeners what Henry calls an "oracle of comfort." Cranmer's message to the
future, echoing the central prophecies of Isaiah and Vergil, ring as the last
words left to us by Shakespeare.111

Footnotes

2.
Pro and anti war positions were not categorized as "isms" or labelled as "militarist"
and "pacifist" until the later nineteenth century, but Renaissance writers used
the contrary adjectives "martial" and "irenic" (after Eirene, the Greek goddess
of Peace and Prosperity) to convey the meanings of "war loving" and "peace loving."
I use the term "militarism" to cover a variety of attitudes affirming war as
a cultural institution and the use of organized violence as an instrument of
state power. As is indicated later, different militaristic attitudes can be
mutually contradictory as well as supportive. "Pacifism" is also an umbrella
term. In general, it denotes hostility to war and to the profession of soldier
and a desire for peace. But varieties of pacifism range from strict non-violence
on absolute religious principles to an acceptance of military action for defensive
purposes as a last resort. See note 47 below and Cady. For extensive primary
evidence of the existence of pacifism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
see Swinne .

5. Shakespeare's
treatment of war and peace has been studied by Bevington, L. Campbell, and Jorgensen.
But neither they nor more recent students of Shakespeare's Jacobean politics
link his pacifism to the Erasmian tradition. See Goldberg, Marcus, Tennenhouse,
and Yates. Woodbridge's brief but trenchant discussions of "'masculine' wartime
values and 'feminine' peacetime values" on 160-170 and in her unpublished essay,
"Palisading the Body Politic," is to my knowledge the only commentary that treats
Shakespeare's shift to pacifism as both politically and dramatically significant.

25. The
traditional view--propounded in Shakespeare's Henry VIII--that Wolsey pursued
peace primarily to further his personal ambitions to become Pope and that he
was responsible for torpedoing the alliance between Henry and Francis has been
challenged by Crowson, who shows evidence that like Thomas More, Wolsey was
compelled by the King to support the militaristic policies the Cardinal had
previously opposed.

30.
Chapiro, 66. This book contains Chapiro's translation of Erasmus' Querela Pacis,
entitled "Peace Protests," along with an essay on Erasmus' political backgrounds
and on the modern applicability of Erasmus' texts. The book is dedicated to
"The United Nations, Embodiment of the ideals of Erasmus and source of the highest
hopes of our times," and its jacket cover includes a tribute by Thomas Mann.
The book typifies a perennial rediscovery and revival of Erasmus' political
writings by antiwar propagandists.

50. 145.
James' regime has elicited remarkably hostile responses from modern historians
and critics. Maurice Lee repeats the standard comparison between James and Neville
Chamberlain as "appeasers" (16). However, despite his quirks and limitations,
James was neither cowardly nor incompetent. Rather than gain territory, his
goal was to bring peace to Britain and Europe. The fact that this goal was not
permanently achieved should not obscure his signal successes. Lee himself shows
how adroitly he managed to negotiate an alliance with Spain, avoid confrontation
with Spain's enemy France, and provide limited support to the rebels in the
Netherlands. This policy strengthened England's international position, confounded
her antagonists, kept her out of war, and enhanced his reputation throughout
Europe. While much can be made of the contrast between Erasmus' politics-- which
sought to limit royal prerogatives and deplored autocratic pretensions-- and
James' theory of Divine Right and his "style of the gods" in ruling, their scholarly,
devotional and peace-oriented outlooks shared much in common.

54. The
larger question of the validity of pacifism in general cannot be adequately
considered here. Three parallel studies of its evolution and role in European
history--the first two sympathetic, the third hostile-- are Johnson's and Brock's
and Howard's (1978). It may be appropriate to briefly consider some of Howard's
more telling critiques insofar as they are relevant to the present discussion.
He identifies pacifism with "Liberalism" and claims that modern European history
is dominated by the struggle between Liberal and "Traditional" approaches to
war and peace. Rejecting the existing war system, the liberal searches for higher
standards of international conduct and an alternative system of collective security.
The "traditional" approach, affiliated with Clausewitz, Metternich and Machiavelli,
accepts international hostility as a norm, war as the inevitable extension of
politics, and a balance of power as the closest possible facsimile to peace.
Howard calls the history of pacifism, "The melancholy story of the efforts of
good men to abolish war but only succeeding thereby in making it more terrible"(130).
Its essential fallacy, he says, is "the habit, far older even than Erasmus,
of seeing war as a distinct and abstract entity about which one can generalise
at large." Instead, he claims, "... war is simply a generic term for the use
of armed force by states or aspirants to statehood for the attainment of their
political objectives"(133). Howard's definitions and first principles are vulnerable
to several critiques. He explodes the concept of "war," which to many is a clear,
distinct, and morally charged idea, into a mere generic term, and elevates "States
or aspirants to statehood," a more slippery, context- bound, and morally questionable
notion, into an absolute. He offers no justification for believing that raisons
d'etat --the claims of any given state perceived by its ruler at any given time--necessarily
outweigh universal humanitarian claims. He also fails to acknowledge that many
pacifists or "liberals," including Erasmus and More, accept the use of military
force in some circumstances while at the same time opposing war in general rather
than perceiving it as a morally neutral and indistiguishable extension of other
means to achieve political ends.

70. See
Rabkin, 33-62. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield also hold that the position
of the play is indeterminate, reflecting the difficulties of maintaining ideological
consistency: "There may be no way of resolving whether one, or which one of
these tendencies (unity versus divergencies) overrides the other in a particular
play, but in a sense it does not matter: there is here an indeterminacy which
alerts us to the complex but always significant process of theatrical representation
and, through that, of political and social process." (l985), 215.

75. Aho,
9-11. This idea is provocatively elaborated by Scarry: "The dispute that leads
to the war involves a process by which each side calls into question the legitimacy
and thereby erodes the reality of the other country's issues, beliefs, ideas,
self conception. Dispute leads relentlessly to war not only because war is an
extension and intensification of dispute but because it is a correction and
reversal of it. That is the injuring not only provides a means of choosing between
disputants but also provides, by its massive opening of human bodies, a way
of reconnecting the derealized and disembodied beliefs with the force and power
of the material world. ... It is when a country has become to its population
a fiction that wars begin."128-131.

78.
Norman Council concludes his study of the idea of honor in Troilus and Cressida
with a similar formulation: "His destruction, of course, is demanded by the
legend, but Shakespeare justifies it by making Hector a part...of this frustrating
world in which men create their own standards of value only to become slaves
to that creation." 86.

80.
England's "Natural Enemy" is Oliver Cromwell's term for Spain (Wernham, 1).
Cervantes' novel ridicules the miles gloriusus whose "reckless fanaticism" in
the words of Bryant Creel, "can be seen to represent the universal human tendency,
whether of individuals or of states, to attempt to render their own internal
failings less conspicuous by denouncing and even persecuting an external element
as the 'enemy,' the success of the deceit or self-deceit being proportionate
to the degree of the self-righteousness of the attacker." 44. On Erasmus' influence
on Cervantes see Bataillon, 777-801.

85.
See Wright, 149-171. This article, published during WWII, nicely contextualizes
itself: "If recent cliches of international politics like 'fifth columnist,'
'collaborationist,' and 'appeaser' were unkown to the seventeenth century, conditions
like those which brought forth the words nevertheless iststed, and all England
rang with warnings of the disasters believed certain to follow in the wake of
the King's stubborn and unpopular foreign policy, which sought at any price,
to conciliate Spain." (149)

102. Jonathan Dollimore (1989) also offers a cynical interpretation of
the ending: "before peace stands a chance of ratification, Coriolanus. is killed.
The two main political conflicts which open the play--patrician against plebian,
Romans against Volscians--remain" (222). But it is clear that without Coriolanus,
the Volsicans will not succeed in continuing their offensive. This reading ignores
the class reconciliation in 5.4 and 5.5. See Barton: "Coriolanus is a tragedy
in that its protagonist does finally learn certain necessary truths about the
world in which he exists, but dies before he has any chance to rebuild his life
in accordance with them. Paradoxically, it is only in his belated recognition
and acceptance of historical change, of that right of the commons to be taken
seriously which the other members of his class in Rome have already conceded,
that he achieves genuinely tragic individuality"(145).

108. See
Tennenhouse, 1985, 109-30. Tennenhouse contrasts the strategies of HV and HVIII
as follows: "Here [HV] history is nothing else but the history of forms of disorder,
over which Henry can temporarily triumph because he alone embodies the contradictions
that can bring disruptions into the service of the state and make a discontinuous
political process appear as a coherent moment....Henry VIII need not struggle
with his opponents because they possess no power except that which he confers
on them" (120-124).

109. As
mentioned earlier, most modern historians believe that it was Wolsey who was
the pacifist, who tried to make peace both with France and Spain, and who was
betrayed by the militaristic machinations of the real Henry VIII. Shakespeare's
imaginary Henry here acts precisely in the manner that Thomas More's imaginary
Hythloday had recommended to the real Henry VIII, disguised in More's text as
the French King: "Hythloday: Now in a meeting like this one, where so much is
at stake, where so many brilliant men are competing to think up intricate strategies
of war, what if an insignificant fellow like myself were to get up and advise
going on another tack entirely? Suppose I said the king should leave Italy alone
and stay home...suppose I told the French king's council that all this war-mongering,
by which so many different nations were kept in social turmoil as a result of
royal connivings and schemings, would certainly exhaust his treasury and demoralize
his people, and yet very probably in the end come to nothing...And therefore
I would advise the French king to look after his ancestral kingdom, improve
it as much as he could, cultivate it every conceivable way. He should love his
people and be loved by them; he should live among them, and govern them kindly,
and let other kingdoms alone, since his own is big enough, if not too big for
him" (24-28).

111. Knight,
1958, made a similar observation about the resonance of Cranmer's prophecy:
"...Shakespeare obeys a fundamental law of the human imagination with analogies
in Isaiah, Vergil and Christianity...the massive play ends with the christening
ceremony of the baby Elizabeth, over whom Cranmer speaks the final prophecy,
Shakespeare's last word to his countrymen..." (85). Knight takes this "last
word" to be "as fine a statement as we shall find in any literature of that
peace which the world craves and for which Great Britain labours." Earlier versions
of the same essay appeared in 1944 and 1940, when, in a work entitled This Sceptered
Isle , Knight presented Cranmer's prophecy as a formulation of England's war
aims: "England has for centuries been at work, consciously and unconsciously,
to establish more than a national order. Her empire has already spread beyond
the seas, this little island expanding and sending out her sons to make those
'new nations' of which Shakespeare's Cranmer so prophetically speaks...one feels
a shadowing, a rough forecast, of the sovereign part to be played by theEnglish-speaking
nations in establishment of world-justice, world-order, and world-peace." And
in 1982, in a collection of essays entitled Authors Take Sides on the Falklands,
[Cited by Hawkes, 68.] Knight still further modified and yet reaffirmed this
reading: "Our key throughout is Cranmer's royal prophecy at the conclusion of
Shakespeare's last play Henry VIII, Shakespeare's final words to his countrymen.
This I still hold to be our one authoritative statement, every world deeply
significant, as forecast of the world-order at which we should aim." Knight's
superimposition of pacifism with royalism, imperialism, and cultural chauvinism
amplifies the ironies in Shakespeare's depiction of Henry VIII as a Jacobean
prince of peace.